The first thing I
needed to do was to acquire a thermometer of sorts, so I went to one of the guys
on my Engineering team, and borrowed a Fluke Digital Thermometer. The more
difficult task was, of course, in trying to get the thermometer leads as close
to the core as possible. Furthermore, in order to be fair, one would have to
attempt to put the leads in the same location. I did take a screenshot of my
Fluke Digital Thermometer, but it was severely overexposed. Hereís a photo
straight from their website:

Fairly cheesy, but I think you get the idea.

The Setup

Windows 2000 SP2

FIC AD11 motherboard

512 MB PC2100 DDR

AMD Athlon 1.368 (144x9.5) GHz. CPU

VisionTek GeForce3

nVidia 21.81 Detonator drivers

RivaTuner tweak application

AMD AGP driver 5.22

VIA 4-in-1 4.33

Quake3 v1.30 1024x768x32 Max-HQ
(unless otherwise noted)

3DMark2001 1024x768x32

Serious Sam v1.04

DronezMark

Giants v1.4

HSF
Results

I experimented with the GeForce3 to determine the highest,
most stable core/memory settings possible. I ended up settling on 250 MHz (core)
and 560 MHz. (memory). Iíll have more to say about this later. The basic
procedure used was as follows: I used
RivaTuner to overclock the GeForce3, allowing sufficient time for the
temperature to settle before running the benchmarks. Even when youíre not
running any 3D games/software, the temperature will still rise. This will be
noted in the graphs as ďNo Load.Ē Once I recorded the temperature, I then fired
up the benchmarking software. In the case of Quake3, I used a looping script to
allow enough time for the temperature to settle. As for 3DMark2001, this
benchmark takes long enough for the temperature to stabilize.

Letís take a look at Quake3.

I was rather shocked by the results, so I proceeded to redo
the tests several times. Each time, I achieved fairly identical scores. No
matter how you slice it, there's a massive difference between the 2 solutions.
As you can see, a setting of 250/560 will give you a differential of 8.2 degrees
under load between the 2!

Letís
now take a look at 3DMark2001

Once
again, we see similar numbers. This time, the differential under load is 7.7
degrees. Pretty awesome so far. Now, let's see how this translates in real-world
applications.